Exquisite Bible Treasure Exemplifies the Transformative Power of the Bible

Carlos: Those who are in attendance, I’ve spoken to some of you, and I tried not to chide you. Have you been to the Museum of the Bible? So, you’re saying yes by raising your hand and saying, “I have been.” Yes, I’m going to take a photo to ensure I send you a T-shirt.

And then, of course, to those who haven’t been—we’re offering you, of course… Today I drove by. You drove by? All right, lovely. That almost counts. So we’re grateful that you drove by. But please stop by.

Please visit this 430,000-square-foot edifice just two blocks off the National Mall. As a matter of fact, to orient yourself a bit: if you went down to Third Street and made a left turn, you’d run right into the Botanical Garden. So if you know D.C. and the Botanical Garden, we’re maybe a couple of blocks from that wonderful museum as well.

The Founding of the Museum of the Bible

Carlos: We’ve been calling it a startup. It was maybe a little over 10 years ago that a group came to the Green family—many of you know the Green family from their work with Hobby Lobby. They were the family who frankly stood up to the federal government when the federal government was requiring them to offer contraceptives as part of their healthcare. They felt that they could not do that, as it did not comport with their values.

But the Green family was approached to start a Museum of the Bible. The initial thought was that it would be housed in Dallas, Texas, but after some further consideration, the building chosen was here—which is extraordinary.

I tell people that if you’ve not been, truly you should come in simply for the architecture. It is that stunning a place. Some of you who are living and working in D.C. have the opportunity to visit more often. But the Greens began collecting, and some of you visited very early on. I even talked to several folks here who said, “Carlos, I came when they were wearing hard hats.” They were still doing some building at the museum.

The museum’s conversion alone was about a $500 million project, and since then we’ve invested almost half of that amount again to create what we believe is one of the world’s finest institutions.

The Mission of the Museum of the Bible

Museums are truly places that inspire. The very root of the word museum is “muse,” and we believe that there’s nothing more inspiring than the Word of God.

So, what would you find if you came to the museum? You would find books like this one here, absolutely. But you would also find immersive experiences. There’s actually a floor dedicated to the Hebrew Bible, where you would move into an experience that—in just a short period of time, about 30 minutes—would take you through from Genesis 1 to the coming of the Messiah.

I heard a father say that he took his 12-year-old daughter through it, and after she went through, she said, “Dad, now I know everything there is to know about the Old Testament.” Not quite, but close.

The museum opened in 2017, and so we’re about to celebrate our seventh anniversary.

The museum has been able to put forth some extraordinary exhibits. You may have come to see the Shroud of Turin when it was on display. We’ve also been able to put together a remarkable exhibit that combined science and faith—two things that we have never seen at odds, though others have.

We worked with a number of organizations, including foundations, who came together to say these two things work hand in hand. We believe in these two books: the Book of Nature and the Bible, which work hand in hand to display the glory of God.

Partnerships make this possible. We have partnerships with the Vatican, with the library of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as well, and with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Some of you have heard about a mosaic floor that is coming to the museum. Let me describe it to you very briefly.

The Jesus Mosaic

Carlos: This mosaic floor was discovered in 2005. It’s never left Israel, and almost no one has seen it. It was discovered when an expansion of a maximum-security prison in Israel was occurring, and during this expansion, this mosaic floor was found.

It has been dated to 230 AD—again, even with our vague understanding, we know that was pre-Constantine, a time of tremendous persecution. And yet, this mosaic floor is the floor of a prayer hall. We might call it a church today, but experts say that’s not quite right for that day. It would have been a much smaller area—but it was indeed a prayer hall where worship was taking place.

And not just any worship, but worship of God, Jesus Christ. As a matter of fact, there are scriptures in Greek on this mosaic floor, and one of them makes reference to Jesus Christ as God. We believe it’s the earliest reference of such a declaration that exists anywhere.

So, when this floor is installed—it is larger than this entire area here—it will be breathtaking. You will see incredible art, truly a work of art, but also a testimony. We believe Christians will reflect deeply on what it must have been like: under persecution, believers already worshiping their God, Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God.

That mosaic, often called the “Jesus Mosaic,” is on its way to the Museum of the Bible.

The Future of the Museum of the Bible

Carlos: As I look to the future of the museum, we had an expert tell us: “Carlos, we believe museums take about seven decades to establish themselves.”

We know there are museums in D.C. like the Smithsonian—actually over 105 museums in Washington, D.C.—so the competition is high. But none of them feature the Word of God.

Our mission is very simple: we invite all people to engage with the transformative power of the Bible. That’s it. We are apolitical, we are non-sectarian, we are not proselytizing. Instead, we allow the Word of God to speak for itself.

When you enter the museum, the very first thing you’ll see is what we call the Grand Hall. This Grand Hall will take your breath away. That was one of our promises: that the museum, when built, would capture the very grandeur of God’s Word.

If you’re not able to see the Jesus Mosaic—which will open in the middle of September and be there for nine months—you should also know the Dead Sea Scrolls are coming. They will first be at the Reagan Library in 2025, and then later that year come to our museum, where they will be housed for several months.

How You Can Support the Museum

Carlos: Several of you have asked, “Carlos, how can we help? We’d love to support the Museum of the Bible.”

First and foremost, pray. The most important thing we do is offer up prayer that God would bring many to the museum, and that His transforming power would change them.

Second, visit. Come and see us. Invite others. We recently hired a marketing firm that found only 7% of Christians even know that the museum exists. So please, share the word.

Third, consider joining. If you’re not a member, we have a number of memberships available. We’d be honored if you joined.

And fourth, consider supporting an initiative. Maybe you’d like to help with K–12 students, or with research, or with exhibits like the mosaic. We’d be happy to talk with you about how you can partner with us.

I’ll close with this thought. I recently became aware of a movement called “Museums Are Not Neutral.” It posits that museums have a social duty to put forth a particular perspective.

But from our perspective, the Bible speaks for itself. Our intent is to allow the Bible to shine in all of its glory, to present it fully, and to allow it to speak to all people, as it has spoken to us.

Next, as promised, is Dr. Anthony Schmidt. Anthony is going to give you a much more particular view of this Bible that we brought with us from the University of Paris—a Bible that has been sitting around for almost a thousand years. He’ll give you a deeper perspective on that specific piece.

Thank you.

Anthony:

I wrote down some notes to keep me on track. I have 25 minutes, and I quickly realized that the size of the letters is almost as big as the size of the notes—I’m going to have some trouble.

My name is Anthony Schmidt. I’m Director of Collections and Curation at the Museum of the Bible, and my team is responsible for the care, use, and interpretation of the museum’s objects. We have around 55,000 objects in our collection, ranging from very small fragments of papyri—some of which document the earliest examples of New Testament writings in existence—all the way to modern translations of the Bible that have been produced, sometimes literally last month, by missionary organizations operating all over the world.

What the Museum of the Bible Holds (and What It Doesn’t)

Anthony: I will say this, though—I really do get asked this question: we do not have the [Ark of the Covenant]. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Do you have any leads? Actually, I was contacted by a gentleman in this region of the country just a couple of weeks ago. He said, “I know where the Ark is—it’s in Arizona.” And, of course, I was curious. But I don’t think he’s on the right track.

Nevertheless, we have a number of stellar objects that testify to the Bible’s history, its stories, and its global impact.

This is one example I brought with me today—my travel companion. It came in the Pelican case with padlocks, and it looked very cool going through the airport, as Carlos alluded to.

We really see ourselves in my department as stewards. We are here to preserve these objects for future generations, and we are here to turn these into resources that the museum can use in exhibits, education programs, public programs, and outreach like tonight—to really educate people, to bring awareness to the museum, and to talk about the Bible’s dynamic, deep, and sometimes dramatic history.

The Bible as a Human Story

Anthony: The history of the Bible—tying into this theme of the conference, together—is really a human story. As we heard in the keynote address the other night, that story includes all the potential that humans offer, and all the fragility as well.

It’s a story of people seeking truth, and also of people living out their faith.

So how did people use this text? How did they transmit it across generations and across media? And how has it shaped human culture?

Sometimes the impact is obvious—in art, in sculpture, in great paintings, and in architecture like cathedrals that testify to people’s conviction about God and faith.

Other times, it’s more hidden in plain sight. You see it in government, in education systems, in science. We recently had an exhibition on the Bible and science, which Carlos mentioned, exploring that relationship historically.

The Paris Pocket Bible

Anthony: Tonight, I want to talk about Manuscript 161 in our collection. It’s a Paris Pocket Bible. It’s called a Paris Pocket Bible because the epicenter of its production was the University of Paris. It’s called a Pocket Bible because—believe it or not—it could fit in your pocket in the 1200s and 1300s.

Here’s an example of one that’s currently on display at the museum. The script is very, very small—it’s all handwritten. This particular Bible was created in the 1200s, around the University of Paris. The script is called “pearl script,” and it’s written on vellum—very thin calfskin.

You can see in the close-up just how precise and beautiful it is—a remarkable example of this kind of book.

The binding, however, is not original. It was created in the 1700s by the then-owner, the Duke of Manchester, at Kimbolton Castle in England. It stayed in the family until after World War II. The family sold off the estate in 1949, and the castle in 1950. Today, it’s a day school.

Why would you create something like this? As a minister preaching, you’d need something bigger—those were called lectern Bibles, and we have many examples of those in the museum.

But these small Bibles were created for students and professors. Occasionally, itinerant preachers would use one as well. They were primarily for education.

This speaks to one of the greatest gifts of the Middle Ages and of the Catholic tradition through the modern age: Western education. More specifically, the scientific tradition in the West.

The Rise of the University

Anthony: The oldest universities in Europe began in cathedral and monastic schools. The University of Paris is one example. The oldest university in Europe, the University of Bologna, was founded just a few decades before Paris. Soon, universities began spreading all over Europe—Oxford, Cambridge in England, St. Andrews in Scotland, Heidelberg in Germany, Vienna in Austria, Kraków in Poland, Montpellier in southern France.

These became epicenters of higher education, emerging from schools with very religious roots. They focused on four main areas:

• The liberal arts (which included everything from literature to astronomy),

• Medicine,

• Law,

• And theology—known as the “queen of the sciences.”

That phrase, “queen of the sciences,” was written by St. Thomas Aquinas, who was a student and later a professor at the University of Paris at precisely the same time this Bible was created.

Now, I won’t oversell it—it’s possible he sat in a class where a Bible like this was used. But I’ll leave that to your imagination. Don’t quote me.

Theology was central, but education at this time was not shy about reading the great works of the ancient pagans.

In medicine, they read Galen. In astronomy, they read Ptolemy. For philosophy—Aristotle, essentially for everything. They also read Cicero.

They saw no real conflict in reading these pagan philosophers. In fact, they were active in translating and disseminating these works throughout Europe. Many works survive today precisely because of the efforts of monasteries and the universities of this period.

And so knowledge for them, you know, truth—all truth—pointed back to God, whether that’s from the Bible or some of these great philosophers of the past. But the Bible is nevertheless really integrated in the daily life of these students and in the curriculum itself.

The False Labeling of the “Dark Ages”

Anthony: What’s interesting about this period—it’s known popularly as the Dark Ages, right? This age of superstition, this age of backward people who believed in witchcraft and astrology, and that destiny was determined by the stars. Yeah, on some level, I think that was true to some extent.

Most educated people at this time, especially the natural philosophers, really sought natural causes. In the same way that people today don’t believe that angels are pushing stars across the sky, they’re not believing this either.

They’re looking for natural causes to explain the natural world. But they believe that God created the world and ordained certain laws that sustain the universe. So there was a religious tone to the way they viewed the natural world and its changes.

These assumptions were deeply rooted in the biblical tradition.

So you have people who study these very complex subjects, these higher-level subjects, and they’re pioneering these university systems. All of this is taking place within a Christian context and being nurtured by the biblical tradition.

The Metaphor of God’s Two Books

Anthony: And there’s one metaphor that really simply sums up their view of the relationship between what we call secular learning and the biblical tradition. It’s “two books,” God’s two books.

Now, you won’t find “God’s two books” in the Bible, but you can infer this from certain verses—namely Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” And in Romans 1: “Since the creation of the world, God’s indivisible qualities can clearly be seen and understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

So God is revealing himself generally—General Revelation—through the works of creation. But God has a special revelation which is contained in the Bible and understood correctly. Now, there is debate on how these relate—there was back then, and there is today—but understood correctly, they pointed to the same truth in harmony.

And this metaphor goes back all the way to antiquity. Some of the earliest Church Fathers write about this. We heard in the keynote again a couple of days ago—Basil, St. Basil—you know, has this quote. Hexaemeron, by the way, was a series of sermons.

This early Church Father—he was a politician, a preacher, a theologian, but mainly he was a preacher—he took care of his flock. The series he preached was on Genesis, the first chapters of Genesis. This really initiated a long tradition of Church Fathers preaching on this topic and creating their own Hexaemeron. It’s a whole genre of early Church writings. Almost every major Church writer would produce their own study of Genesis.

So Basil—here’s a quote: “Let us glorify the Supreme Artificer for all that was wisely and skillfully made. By the beauty of visible things, let us raise ourselves to him who is above all beauty.”

The Natural World as Good and Worthy of Study

Anthony: What Basil is doing in these sermons is taking the creation stories, the first and second chapters of Genesis, and sometimes drawing from natural philosophy in his day. He’s saying, “Okay, our understanding of physics here is really helping us understand the biblical text in a deeper way.” But sometimes he’s saying, “Well, look, some of these pagan philosophers, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

So there’s a debate in these sermons between his reading of the biblical text and contemporary philosophy—just like there is today. And this is 1,700 years ago. You see this time and again in other Church Fathers.

What’s coming out of this, though, is really important. In both Western and Eastern Christianity—Basil is in the East—certain ideas become fundamental to the way Christians in the West would do science and study the natural world, certain principles, certain assumptions:

• That the natural world is created.

• The natural world is orderly.

• God has established laws and sustains them.

• These laws can be understood.

That’s important.

And the natural world is good—as opposed to other philosophies that say the natural world is kind of icky, a mere shadow of this perfect realm that exists beyond our understanding. Christianity says the natural world is good, and therefore it deserves to be studied.

In fact, because it is sustained by laws, we can actually study the natural world and get a better sense of the Creator.

The Foundations of Western Science

Anthony: As the centuries roll on, these principles remain. And this is the basic foundation of Western science.

You see this in Bonaventure—he was also a student at the University of Paris at the same time as Thomas Aquinas, again could have been in the same classroom. But again, he’s drawing from God’s creation: “The world is like a book on which the creative Trinity is reflected and represented.”

So this is the Scripture I was curator for. This is something we did cover, and I do want to point out a few things here.

This is Georges Lemaître—an astronomer, mathematician, in the 1920s and 1930s, known today as the father of the Big Bang. His calculations and ideas were confirmed by CMB just a short time after he published. Hubble gets the credit for expansion of the universe—it’s now called the Hubble Law—but anyway.

I wanted to draw your attention to this. This is a medieval cathedral portal door, modeled off a very famous door in Chartres—the Cathedral of Chartres, neighboring the University of Paris.

The Royal Portal has unique features. In the middle of the portal, you’ll find God enthroned, surrounded by the apostles, martyrs, and saints. And on the perimeter, what do you find? You find the seven liberal arts, and a few other figures that represent learning and knowledge, whether that’s from Cicero or not.

The message here, though, is that all of this is unified. All of this points back to God. Truth is wherever you find it.

The Truth About the “Dark Ages”

Anthony: So, back to this. This Bible comes from a really, really unique and transformative period in Western history.

This is a moment when—sorry—so it speaks to this vibrancy, this intellectual culture, this context that’s not really the Dark Ages at all. In fact, you hear popular writers now call it the “Age of Light,” because there was so much energy going on in universities like the University of Paris.

Just a little bit more about the manuscript itself. These were produced not in monasteries, like earlier manuscripts had been, but in workshops. These were professional scribes and professional artists producing them in large quantities for a growing society that had an appetite for this. You could almost call them “mass-produced”—though that’s a modern term that doesn’t quite capture what’s happening here.

The text is written in what’s called Pearl Script. I invite you to come up here after this talk to see how tiny it is. The manuscript contains 82 illuminated and historiated letters. “Historiated” simply means that a historical figure appears in the letter.

For example, this is the opening page of the Book of Wisdom. Now, we don’t have the person’s name here, but we can infer from the crown, the sword, and the light that this figure represents Solomon.

In these classrooms, they were pioneering advancements in optics—studying light—pioneering advances in astronomy and history. And so this was really setting the stage for the centuries to come.

Pocket Bibles Introduce Chapters

Anthony: What’s unique about this period, as well, is how we read the Bible today. This is really the beginning of the introduction of chapters. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, introduced this system. You can see this in the manuscript by the alternating red and blue letters, which signal the beginning of a new chapter.

Why do this? Well, it’s practical. If you’re reading in class or among others, you need a way of referencing where you are in the text. It’s the same reason verses were introduced in the 15th–16th centuries, as people were beginning to study the text deeply, in multiple languages.

This Bible contains the entire Vulgate that we read today, including Jerome’s introductions to each book—the Old and New Testament, and the Psalms.

So, what’s the legacy of this Bible? Well, it’s huge. The modern university system that we take for granted today really has its roots in this period—the 11th through 13th centuries.

But even more significant is its impact on the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution was not a break from the medieval period. It was an outgrowth of it. Figures like Galileo were standing on the shoulders of medieval natural philosophers who were already doing incredible work in these centers of learning.

And of course, it speaks to a hunger for truth that still exists today. People of faith are still making major contributions to science. For example, we covered Mary Keller in our “Scripture & Science” exhibition. She was a pioneer in computer science, wrote some of the first code for modern computers, and was the first woman to receive a PhD in computer science.

We have inherited quite a lot from the past. But it is also the story of life—that we live in a world shaped by the incredible moral and intellectual contributions of people before us. We want to preserve that, share it with others, and invite you to come to the Museum to see this and other incredible works.